Friday, November 30, 2012

The Small World of Words

Neuroskeptic posted recently about this online project called "The Small World of Words," which is an effort to create the largest word-association database ever by having lots of people complete this interactive exercise.They show you fourteen words, one at a time, and you type in the first three words that come to your mind in the three empty fields below the prompt-word. If nothing comes to your mind, you're supposed to type "no response." I had one word where that happened (the word was "grief", and instead of seeing an image I could describe, or a color, or hearing the word echo and mutate into various sound-alikes, I actually felt an attenuated version of grief itself), so I entered that into all three fields.They do want everyone taking the test to be a fluent English speaker, but other than that there are no restrictions. And you can be from anywhere, and you don't have to be a native speaker --- just fluent.Probably, if your English is good enough for you to be reading this blog, you can participate in this study.

A Portrait of the Autist

I'm a recent KU graduate with degrees in biochemistry and English lit. I'm also on the autism spectrum, having been diagnosed with PDD-NOS at age 5. It's quite likely that, were I to be seen now, I'd be diagnosed with Asperger syndrome.
I write about a lot of things, which include but are not limited to: autism research, psychology, neuroscience, feminism, autism advocacy/neurodiversity, autism in literature, and broad, sweeping cultural critique. I also draw, paint and take the occasional random picture.
Spam and abusive comments meet the icy-cold fury of my deleting finger.

Recommended Reading

These are books I've read that I thought worthy of recommendation; it's not meant to be an exhaustive reading list in any topic. I will add to it as I discover more books I think people need to read.

Because I believe that true freedom of thought is incompatible with a world where all our books, opinions, news and entertainment comes from the same handful of corporations, I have linked to independent bookstores whenever I could.